The fonts of Blue Sky Innovation

Designers know that from Comic Sans and Copperplate to Impact and Courier New, every font evokes a reaction that adds to the meaning of the words it creates.

When those words are the image-rich and aspirational "Blue Sky Innovation," the font choices must be fresh, modern and forward-thinking, while firmly conveying business.

While workshopping the logo with Chicago Tribune Media Group's creative team, designer Katie Wasserman presented an idea using a font by Just Another Foundry, a two-person type-design studio in Berlin. It captured our attention, and we took a closer look.

Wasserman suggested and we settled on Bernina Sans, the slightly more playful counterpart to her fraternal and more formidable twin brother, Bernino Sans. Together as Bernini Sans, this award-winning font duo comes in a wide range of widths and weights and has been lauded highly for this reason.

Typographica recently praised Bernini Sans, saying that readers will "simply find Bernini to be pleasantly legible and stylistically versatile," while allowing "designers to simply make their thing." The Condensed ExtraBold variation, when used in all-caps, allowed our "thing" to demand your attention through its hefty verticals, crisp angles and appropriate curves.

Thanks to sister Bernina, the alternative capital "K" provides a more delicate and less-grounded presence, lightening up our "SKY."

The ingenuity of the studio model itself also struck a chord with us. Founded by Tim Ahrensin in 2004, and joined by Shoko Mugikura in 2010, the firm designs fonts in both OpenType and webfont formats. Selling masterfully crafted fonts for immediate use in both print and on the web is not only a refreshing business model but it puts web designers in a happy place. This one-stop shop approach alleviates the hassle of searching and creating accounts for multiple font websites with a wide range of pricing and licensing schemes. Plus, with the proliferation of CSS3 support on most modern browsers, every font designer must make @font-face compatibility a top, and affordable, priority.

Folio, the font used for our "INNOVATION," was designed in the late 1950s by the Bauer typefoundry. In an era ripe with clean, sans-serif, versatile fonts, Folio also drew inspiration from the turn-of-the-century Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface. But its more circular anatomy and lower x-heights than colleagues Helvetica and Univers made it a popular display type for newsprint.

In the lighter-weight variations with wide letter-spacing, also in all-caps, Folio creates a platform with "INNOVATION." It features more circular "O's" than Univers but doesn't include the pointed caps of Futura, reinforcing the scaffold-like geometry used to support "BLUE SKY."

Wrapping up the design are two different blues stacked on top of one another. The darker of the two, the official Tribune blue, fills the lower portion and is topped off with a lighter, dustier shade. Though exaggerated, an arch separates the blues conveying the horizon, which is also represented by a slightly less curvaceous slice through the one-color logo variation.

Overall, the color choices and line elements strike a balance between the thick and condensed "BLUE SKY" and the thin and widely spaced "INNOVATION."

Please let us know what you think with a comment below. We look forward to more design-meets-innovation discussions in the future.